October 15, 2025 / Issue No. 10

Hello and welcome to a post-October Federal Holiday edition of Regulator.

Last week, I caught wind that House Speaker Mike Johnson, along with several top House Republican leaders, had held an exclusive press briefing about the government shutdown that was restricted to “new media.” The contents of the meeting were published as a “scoop” by the Washington Reporter — a Congress-focused publication founded by several GOP operatives that’d been established as a Punchbowl for conservatives — which described the call as “set[ting] the record straight” and “the latest way that House Republicans are taking their messaging directly to the American people.” Mainstream press did not appear to have been invited onto the call. (Speaker Johnson's office did not return a request for comment.)

Perhaps a decade ago, “new media” would have been places like The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, even The Verge: media outlets that were publishing traditional news, but online. But these days among Republicans in power, “new media” is now a polite catch-all for “right-wing media.” That category is pretty broad, encompassing news outlets, creators, podcasters, streamers — even outlets broadcast over older mediums like television. But the best way I’d describe 2025 “new media” in Washington is that they’d have to be a MAGA-inclined reporter who’s willing to sign Pete Hegseth’s pledge to avoid reporting on the Pentagon.

Prior to the Capitol Hill incident, I’d only seen that term used within the Trump administration. From day one, the White House had designated a seat in the press briefing room for “new media,” accepting applications from tens of thousands of creators and conservative outlets for a chance to sit in on press briefings. In a Donald Trump-less vacuum, there would have been nothing too controversial about a White House doing something similar — in fact, it would have been a tacit acknowledgement of the digital era — but it was soon followed by Podcast Row, an opportunity for right-wing podcasters to have interviews and face time with Cabinet officials. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt deliberately framed it as a snub to the loathed MSM, saying in a video posted on X that the invited podcasters probably had “more views than CNN and legacy media.” I would bet that they’d never invite the Pod Save America boys to attend a future Podcast Row. (If there’s anyone from the White House reading this, though, I’m willing to be surprised.) 

The concept popped up in other areas of the admin, too. During a visit to a Portland ICE facility, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem kept the press a block away from the building, but allowed MAGA streamer Benny Johnson to accompany her. (It may have backfired, however, after he claimed that she had faced down an “army of antifa” from the rooftop of the facility, but the video he posted showed perhaps a dozen protesters.) Hegseth began his tenure as Defense secretary by implementing a “rotation program” that uprooted defense reporters at legacy outlets from their dedicated workspaces at the Pentagon and replaced them with One America News, the New York Post, and Breitbart. 

It soon led to restrictions on accredited journalists being able to walk through the Pentagon, and has now culminated in his demand that outlets at the Pentagon agree to a new set of rules that would prevent them from publishing information unauthorized by the Defense Department — or even asking about unauthorized material. So far, the vast majority of news outlets have protested this move, including major conservative outlets like Fox News, Hegseth’s former employer. But OAN has agreed to the rules, and there’s little doubt that it counts as “new media,” despite being a cable news channel. If the trend accelerates, we are very much looking at a future where the MAGA-preferred “new media” will have all the access in the world, and the legacy media (maybe even Fox News) will be perpetually iced out. 

But we at The Verge have a tendency to think a few steps further into the future (it’s literally in our name) and can’t help but wonder: what happens when new media upstarts are actually in charge? Last week, Elizabeth Lopatto wrote a barn burner of a column about the latest “new media” media move — Bari Weiss, conservative darling and editor-in-chief of The Free Press, had sold her Substack-based publication to Paramount in exchange for $150 million and the position of running CBS News. I’ve read miles of columns about Bari Weiss, but I have never seen anyone make Liz’s point: Bari Weiss is just another female CEO on a glass cliff, steering the unprofitable CBS News into its inevitable death on behalf of her new corporate, Trump-loving overlords at Paramount. Except this time, there’s just a tiny bit of culture war window dressing involved. 

I talk with her about her incredibly viral column below, but first:

Tina Nguyen: I think what made your piece the most brutal out of every think piece I've seen about Bari Weiss is that media critics tend to be men. People who hire people in journalism tend to be white men. And I think what you brought to all of this was: Wait, Bari Weiss is a woman who was just put in charge of a dying corporation. Guess what happens to women who are hired to run dying corporations? Was the concept of the “glass cliff” front of mind for you, or was that something that just I read into later? 

Elizabeth Lopatto: So this was a Nilay Patel special. We have a long-standing relationship of trolling the living bejeezus out of each other, and I usually do it by sending him stuff that's going to cause him psychic damage early in the morning, and he usually does it by assigning pieces to me. But, we were talking about it, and we saw pretty eye to eye on that: this seemed like a glass cliff situation. If you look at her resume, there's no suggestion that she is in any way qualified to do any of this. I’m just being as blunt as possible. 

She's got no history with TV. She's never reported. And if you're familiar with The Free Press, you're sort of familiar with how low-stakes it is and how frequently it gets stories wrong. In the context of The Free Press, that matters a lot less, right? It's a much smaller audience. It's an audience that has been recruited I think pretty deliberately. It's an audience of like-minded people. It's writers who are like-minded people. There is a certain vibe to the quote-unquote “would-be contrarians” of The Free Press. Curiously, they all seem to think the same. And if you look at something like CBS, that's not what it is at all and that's not what it's ever been. Those are two really, really different audiences with two really, really different expectations and different mediums. When you think about that, she’s just going to fail, and there are so many different ways she can do it. 

The counter-argument from the right, I think, would be that her ideological bona fides are more robust. And since she's new, she doesn't have any sort of preconceived notions of what journalism should and should not be. Does that matter in how she manages to shape CBS news as a functioning organization? 

I mean, it does and it doesn't, right? 

You can certainly imagine her as being a conduit for the right to appear on network television instead of Fox News. I think that's probably the most powerful thing she's got going for her at the moment, that pipeline that she can tap. But she is a very specific type of right-wing figure, in that she is not MAGA. She's not a true believer. Maybe the best way of describing her politics is that she's a Trumpist with qualifications. And so she might not be viewed with the same kind of warmth that a fellow traveler, somebody who is a pure Trumpist, might be. That's probably why she was the compromise figure, right? Because you can point to her occasionally, very anemically criticizing the Trump administration and say, Hey, she's independent. I mean, okay, if you say so. I look at the larger picture of the amount of money that got paid to Trump and the fact that the CBS News ombudsman is now a Republican donor, and I'm kind of — mmm — I see some things here. 

The other piece of it is that the reason why having experience in television is really important is that reporting for television is really, really different from the reporting that I typically do. I can have a conversation with somebody for hours and get the three quotes I need. I'm not in a rush. I don't have to think about the time of my camera crew, or setting up a shot or any of that. I can just embed myself in somebody's life and see what it's like and then write about it. Whereas for TV, you need to be doing it all on camera. You have to capture the visual. And that is a really difficult and underestimated skill. For those of us who lived through the various pivots to video, it's a skill that you come to appreciate when you have been asked to do video, because it is not easy. I see some talk about where she's being used to, you know, pick panelists for a debate show — that seems like a relatively low-level thing, especially given her history with being a guest on Bill Maher’s show. 

But if you think about TV news, she is the head of news and that's everything from on-camera interviews with major figures, to sending people to Portland to cover the antifa frog and the naked bike rides, to thinking about how to frame a big story that might be kind of abstract in a visual way, which is the hardest part of doing TV news. When you're dealing with stuff like documents or you're thinking about policy, anything that's a little bit abstract. It can be really difficult to figure out how to provide visuals for that, in a way that remains engaging and that justifies using that medium. That is legitimately hard, and she has no experience with it. 

She was talking about moving CBS's content to digital and TikTok, but The Free Press isn't really known for its video content.

It's so much harder than people think. I don't do very much video, and the reason I do so little of it is because it is incredibly time consuming and incredibly difficult. Respect to people like Mia Sato who can make it look easy, but that's not everybody. It's a really, really steep learning curve, and it's a more accessible entry into doing anything visual in media. But going from that to television is like being asked to go from walking to speed skating without having so much as roller skated in between. 

Say that Bari Weiss ends up turning CBS News into more of a digital-first format in the way that all of these other networks have tried. Does that count as a win or a loss for her if she pulls that off? 

Let's stipulate that she doesn't just do what other people have done, which is exactly the same thing they're doing on television, but online. If she's going to do this thing that’s already failed, I can already tell you what's going to happen, which is it'll fail again. But let's say that she comes up with some sort of interesting idea about how to do that. There just is not as much money in advertising online, or eyeballs online, or getting people to pay subscription fees online, as there is on television. That's still really the moneymaker. If you are successful online, in some ways, that's good, but it's not going to replace revenue from your real moneymaker if you aren't focused on the moneymaker. If you have to pick a focus, I think your focus has to be the legacy TV stuff. You have to think about, Okay, how do I make a 60 Minutes that people actually do treat as appointment viewing? How do I think about the evening news in such a way that it becomes vital again? 

I don't think that's a completely impossible task, but it is certainly an extremely difficult one. I'm already seeing reporting from Oliver Darcy that she's meeting with talent about hosting, and that’s cool. That is an important part of what she’s doing. But seeing that CBS is in third place in terms of the nightly news, you need something that's bigger than just changing out your talent in order to even compete as a legacy brand against these other legacy brands. 

So it's not like she's hiring new people, but she's shuffling people around and promising to turn them into brands. 

That is a thing that works online. That is a place where parasocial relationships happen. That is part of the reason why people like getting their news from TikTokers and YouTubers. That is an online sensibility. I don't know how compatible it is with power in quite the same way, because part of that parasocial relationship is that those people are reachable. They're in their comments section and we could see them. That is not the case for any anchor on television and for good reason. There are certain differences about the way these mediums function that I think make that kind of cult of personality very easy to establish online. It’s more difficult to do on television. It's not impossible. I mean, Oprah did it. But Oprah was a singularly talented interviewer. 

Final question: Paramount purchased The Free Press to get Bari at CBS. It’s the largest digital media acquisition in quite some time. But now that it's under Paramount ownership, what happens to that organization? 

Fantastic question. I mean a bunch of people who bought it are people like Marc Andreessen, so there’s a certain amount of conservative back-patting going on here. But I don't know what The Free Press looks like as part of a corporate conglomerate, because its big marketing point was that it was going to tell you everything that the corporate conglomerates would not, right? Like, it's, you know, boldly saying contrarian things that the mainstream media will never print. And now they’re the mainstream media. I don't know what they do there. Like, I genuinely do not know how they function as part of a corporate conglomerate, when their entire value pitch was that they were not the corporate conglomerate. 

So now they're The Man, and they never wanted to be The Man.

Good luck to them with that. I mean, the whole thing seems really ill-considered. Semafor reporter Max Tani had a memo that she sent out where she asked her staff to send her a memo of what they do every day. Every single news reporter immediately recognizes that [as] a signal that there are going to be job cuts. That's the implicit threat, because that's what DOGE was doing when Elon Musk was running it. And on top of that, if you're thinking about this new world order and how to answer that memo, that suggests a level of micromanaging that is maybe not fantastic for the organization. 

One of the things about leading is that you have to trust that the people underneath know what they are doing. A really good example is, actually, from Elon's world: Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX. She's pretty autonomous. Obviously, Musk has some say in the company that he owns, but on a day-to-day basis, she's the boss, and that is a long-standing and close relationship. If you don't have those kinds of trusted deputies — you know that they can operate in your absence, you know that they know what they're doing — but you're trying to micromanage everything, that's a recipe for disaster,  especially at the scale at which CBS News operates. 

Oh, this is gonna be messy. 

I'm so excited. Is that obvious? 

Round of applause to whomever came up with the headline for this story from The Guardian:

See you next week.